Handful is a bit extreme ;)
But seriously, it is easy to troubleshoot due to the interative nature of development in the REPL, the similiarity with mathematical formula and their layout. A PhD student wrote his thesis in 2008 about parallelization, FPGAs, ASICS and arrays, and was fully intending to write it in J, but his advisor suggested something more known, so he wrote it in Haskell. I'll put in the reference when I find it.
There is a table in the paper that shows the math formula, the Haskell and then J. Pretty interesting comparison.
To me, if you are not using a prover, then it is mainly going over 10K LOC 1 to 3 times vs. 100 LOC 10 times, 30K LOC reviewed vs. 1K LOC reviewed for errors and correctness.
"it is easy to troubleshoot due to the interactive nature" isn't going to cut it. You cannot change the code of an etherum contract after the fact. Once it's used there is no second chance.
Please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts on HN.
This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine here, but users should have some kind of consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be an entirely different forum.
Thanks for bringing it back to the OP's topic, but I was specifically addressing the quote the OP made about number of errors per LOC tally. I was pointing out how it could be weak metric, since the languages used in the examples might contain many LOC of template boilerplate that would make for a low bug:LOC off the bat.
An ADA hello world is 5 LOC vs. 1 for a lot of other languages.
Java is not too different.
J and Python are 1 LOC, and typically not template text, but originally coded.
J of course has a different problem; only a handful of people can even parse it, much less opine on correctness.